With the invention of personal computing, advancements in computer software and digital photography, it is now much easier to capture panoramic images. In fact, using a proper photography technique and panoramic equipment, it is now possible to create near-perfect panoramas at extremely high resolutions. Some photographers are able to create gargantuan “giga-pixel” panoramas. Today, digital panoramic photography is quite popular and common not only among landscape photographers, but also among architectural and cityscape photographers. In other instances, panoramic photographs may be used by map services in order to produce map views such as “street view” in GOOGLE™ maps, for example.
Generally speaking, capturing panoramic photographs may be done via a plethora of methods and devices. For example, in order to capture panoramic photographs, a curved lens camera may be used to perform a short rotation or a full rotation of its lens to capture the photograph. In other examples, a fixed lens camera may produce panoramic photographs by using different techniques such as segmentation. Furthermore, catadioptric and 3D cameras may be used as well in order to capture panoramas.
However, a multitude of issues or errors may be encountered while generating panoramic photographs such as vertical banding, vignetting, ghosting, stitching errors, color shifts, curved horizons and others. For example, the main cause of ghosting problem is movement between frames. In other words, ghosting may occur when an object in the overlap zone (the area where two frames overlap) has moved position between shooting one frame and the next. The moving object may be a car, a cloud, a person and the like.
Therefore, some photographs may have been generated with errors or noise due to an object having moved from its initial position in one frame to another position in the second frame. Currently, such errors due to misinterpretation of the objects position in sequential images are dealt by discarding the errored images from the set of captured images.